


Gelatinous Doom

by infinitumetultra



Series: Chop and Change [1]
Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Darcy Lewis Smut Week, F/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Relationship, cupcakes are ice breakers, even less mentioning of Thor, jello is evil, mentions of Jane Foster and Erik Selvig, nevermind that there isn't any smut yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-12
Updated: 2012-10-12
Packaged: 2017-11-16 03:48:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/535149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infinitumetultra/pseuds/infinitumetultra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was probably a good thing Darcy didn’t have a plan, since SHIELD decided to swoop in on her life. It wasn't her fault, she didn't expect a Norse god to fall out of the sky and she really didn’t expect to be sitting by Agent Coulson’s bedside discussing jello.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gelatinous Doom

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Fuck Yeah Darcy Lewis Smut Challenge (despite the glaring lack of smut at this point) for the prompt: dessert. First time writing in a long while, first time writing for the Marvel Cinematic Universe fandom and my first time writing Phil Coulson at all. Both exhilarating and terrifying.

“Whoa.”

At that moment it was the only thought she had, or else there would have been a litany of out of place pop-culture references and snarkiness abound. It had been a long week for her, she deserved some leeway. Her graduation had been postponed due to the Battle of New York (as it was being coined by nearly everyone) and when she wasn’t glued to the television watching the footage she was Skyping with her ex-boss. Jane had been furious about being sent away when she realized just what SHIELD had been up to and the only person she could possibly complain to was Darcy. After FINALLY getting to walk for her degree, she had been cornered by Director Fury of SHIELD (aka Jack Booted Thugs’R’US) who said he had an offer for her. All in the span of seven days.

All manners of deflective sarcastic commentary would not sway him and here she was staring at Agent iPod Thief looking half-dead in a hospital bed. Fury stood idly behind her, clasping his hands behind his back and frowning at the unconscious agent. Darcy wasn’t a hundred percent sure what had happened, but it was obviously a close call.

“He looks like crap.”

“He had a scepter go straight through his chest.” Fury responded. “Nicked a lung, pierced a major blood vessel.” When she turned to look at him, a look of disbelief on her face, he gave a wry smile.

“A scepter?”

Fury sighed a little, and brushed her question off. “Agent Coulson’s going to be out of commission for a while, he’s going to need help making sure he doesn’t get buried underneath the work that’s going to build up while he’s gone.”

“You can’t just assign his work to someone else?”

“I could,” Fury nods.

“But you’re not gonna?”

“Nope.”

“So… what,” Darcy shrugged helplessly, looking away from Coulson’s unconscious form, “do you need me to do?”

“Help him stay above water while he’s indisposed,” Fury said.

“You want me to go back to being a coffee gopher?”

“I want you to make sure Agent Coulson has anything and everything he may need,” Fury says. “And when he’s back in the game you’ll shadow him and learn the ropes.”

“I’m not a super secret spy ninja or whatever, dude.” Darcy retorted. “I mean, my taser skills can’t be matched but no way can I kill a grown man with a post-it note.”

“Coulson does a lot of delegating, dude,” Fury said. “We work in a lot of sensitive territory, sometimes politics is unavoidable.” When she didn’t look convinced he rolled his eye, “look, Lewis, you’re smart, you’re resourceful and you already know too much… you get what I’m saying?”

“Either accept the job or sleep with the fishies?” Darcy’s eyes widened a fraction, the only tell that she actually believed that was what he was insinuating.

Fury’s lip might have twitched, might have, but it could have been a trick of the light. “What do you say, Miss Lewis?”

“Wait, seriously? If I say no I get the body bag?!”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t not say it.”

“Miss Lewis.”

Darcy sighed, and mulled it over. Fury had a decent point, if she was just helping with paperwork and keeping world leaders happy while still going through on top secret plans – it might help. Not to mention the thought that the Universe was a lot bigger now, other worlds were noticing them and eventually they would need to make some kind of relationship with them – she would practically be a foot in for intergalactic political relations. The more she seriously considered it, the better it sounded, but she also wasn’t one hundred percent sure Fury was above killing her if she declined.

“Fine,” she shook her head a little.

“Good.” Fury said. “Let’s get some paperwork set up,” he gestured for them to exit. Just as she went to open it, put his hand on the door and said, “Miss Lewis before we go ahead with this, you have to know that Coulson’s status is classified.”

“I don’t —”

“Coulson has been reported as Killed in Action. Until an opportune time rises his true status is to be kept secret.” He watched her, like he expected her to change her mind at that.

Darcy felt the questions on the tip of her tongue. Why was he reported dead and why was it such a big deal? She figured she had enough of knowing classified things for the day, anything more mind blowing and her head might have literally exploded. “Killed in Action. Got it.”

–

Fury didn’t expect her to get started the next day, he was surprised when she showed up at his office asking for some kind of direction. To everyone else at SHIELD she was labeled as an intern, supposed to be helping a dude named Sitwell tie up all of Coulson’s loose ends. Darcy didn’t so much mind that she was lying to everyone she met, the real pain in the ass was the seminars for new agents. She didn’t even want to be an Agent. Still she went, and took up residence in one of the many SHIELD housing apartments (which may as well have been called shoeboxes.) The only seminars and classes she refused to go to were the ones that had anything to do with guns, hand-to-hand combat or any kind of physical exertion.

She was not a super secret spy person and she was not going to become a super secret spy person. So during those hours she managed to weasel her way into Coulson’s office (for a high security establishment breaking into the office was remarkable easy) and began going through endless amounts of paperwork. An hour into her seventh day of reading things that were probably six clearance levels above hers the door barged open. Darcy looked up immediately and froze, finding Maria Hill staring at her from the doorway.

“Uh, I can explain!”

“No need.” Hill said crisply, and lifted up a file before approaching the desk. “Fury wants you to add this to your high priority file.”

“My… high priority file?”

The woman stared at Darcy blankly for a moment, as if deciding whether or not she was going to take mercy her. “Organizing. Things that have to be looked at as soon as he wakes up, things that can be passed on to Sitwell and things that you can handle yourself.”

“Wait, you know?”

“Yes.” Her tone was short.

“And did you just say things I can handle myself?”

“Yes. Low priority. Very low priority.” Maria said, handing her the file and turning on her heel to leave. “You can’t avoid combat training forever, Lewis.”

“Wanna bet?”

For the remainder of her day (and most of her night) she tuned out the world with her iPod and made a completely new filing system for Agent Coulson’s ever growing workload. Filing and organizing was easy, a second nature to her, but the thought of actually carrying out some of his work for him kept nagging at her. It wasn’t going to be easy and she felt like Fury had just left her to the dogs. But she knew she would make it work… She always did and she had nothing to lose.

The only plans she had after graduation was to find any kind of internship in DC, and hope for the best. Once upon a time she had hoped to put everything that happened in New Mexico behind her. Her, Jane and Erik were close – you really couldn’t go through an experience like Puento Antiguo with someone else and not come out of it with a higher form of companionship – but she wasn’t a scientist and she barely got her six college credits. Having spent an extra six months out in the desert with Jane, because Erik got scooped up for another project soon after and she wasn’t letting Jane try to find Thor on her own, but eventually she had to move on – especially when it seemed like the God of Thunder wasn’t in a rush to come back. She should have known better than to think she would have just gotten to go live her life without any interruption from SHIELD.

They did interrupt. And here she was throwing herself into the work, just like she did with Jane. It didn’t matter to her that she was completely unprepared, didn’t really trust anyone in the agency and grossly unqualified – she was going to give it as much of her attention as possible.

After a few weeks she had a decent routine set up; she completed almost all of her Junior Agent Seminars and even clocked in some combat training time (not nearly enough, as both Hill and Sitwell insisted on reminding her.) A lot of her time was now spent in Agent Coulson’s office, the stack of high priority assignments and forms growing larger while she slowly figured out how to manage the low priority ones herself. Agent Sitwell had been helpful when he could be, Hill was always curt and concise when they interacted and she hadn’t seen Fury since that first day. She hadn’t seen Coulson either, but she was pretty familiar with his work and his office space at this point.

No pictures of family, no motivational posters or little toys, not even a stress ball. The walls were a nice shade of blue, however, which made up for a lack of windows. The desk chair was comfy (she was too afraid to adjust the height of it so her feet barely touched the ground) and the couch on the far side of it was to die for on the comfort scale. The only hint of any kind of individuality to the room was a tiny little sticker of Captain America’s shield on one of his pens. She was sure not to use it, she hated it when her favorite pens ran out of ink and she assumed it was his favorite if he managed to risk showing some kind of personality by decorating it.

So as she took a small pop-tart break on the evening of her twenty-second day on duty, she figured everything was pretty okay so far. She hadn’t managed to fuck anything up yet. There was a routine and it was quiet, no one ever really talked to her and she found she was okay with that. It was almost midnight, she was considering calling it a night after finishing up a small report on damages done to SHIELD weapons supplies during what she had learned was Thor’s little brother’s temper tantrum-esque rampage on Earth. Then the phone rang.

That hadn’t happened before. For a moment she froze, but the incessant ringing continued and she jumped up. There was no time to mourn her pop-tart falling to the floor as quickly picked up and pressed the receiver to her ear only to hear it clack against something. Cursing quietly, she plucked her headphones out of her ears before trying again.

“Hi, sorry! Agent Coulson’s office, this is Darcy – I mean Junior Agent Lewis.” Darcy visibly winced at her lack of phone answering smoothness and hoped it wasn’t Fury.

“Lewis.” It was Fury.

“Director,” she said back.

“He’s awake.”

“Really?”

“No.” Fury said blandly. “I’m wasting my valuable time to play a joke on you, Lewis. I’ve got six meetings scheduled on top of each other but I thought ‘hey, why not play a joke on the rookie.’”

“Okay, Jesus, time to switch to decaf.” She said back, and winced again because yelling at the big boss? Not the best idea. “So… ?”

“So get your ass down to medical.”

He hung up. Nevermind that it was after midnight (on a Tuesday nonetheless) he wanted her to go say hi to her boss. Who she wasn’t even sure knew he was her boss yet. Doing her best not to have a breakdown she quickly put the office back together, grabbed her bag and went off to medical. The cleaning crew was out, and a few of them offered her some greetings and smiles but she was too distracted to really answer them. The Med Bay was bustling because the Med Bay never quit, but she was allowed towards Coulson’s super secret hospital room with a flash of her badge to the nurses, and before she was allowed in she actually had to swipe it through a lock. The door clicked as it unlocked and she slowly entered.

He looked better. Pale and a little sickly, but not closing in on death. His eyes were locked on her and his eyebrows shot up a fraction as she entered. There was an awkward tension in the air that Darcy wasn’t sure how to dispel yet so she set her bag down and turned to face him completely. Coulson had something in his hands, but she couldn’t really tell what it was. She hoped to god or Thor’s dad or something that he wasn’t going to shoot her for taking over his office and reading countless of classified files.

“Miss Lewis.” He finally said by way of greeting. His voice was hoarse and yet still came off as collected.

“It’s Junior Agent Lewis,” she corrected, fidgeting a little.

“Sorry.” His lips twitched a little.

“So… how are you feeling?”

“Like I was stabbed.”

Darcy blinked. “They didn’t give you the good stuff?”

“Excuse me?”

“Pain killers. I shattered my collar bone once… they gave me Vicodin. It was great.” She raised her eyebrows.

“Got a morphine drip,” he vaguely gestured to the various tubes hanging to his right.

“If you’re still feeling all stabby you should probably…you know… kick up the drippy goodness a notch.”

“Good idea,” Coulson said after a brief glance in her direction and reached for the controls.

“Just to clear things up: you know that you’re my boss now, right?” She tried to be as tactful and gentle as possible.

“Yes, Director Fury came in and we had a talk,” Coulson said. “You’ve been helping Agent Sitwell in my absence?”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “I’ve got three piles: stuff that has to wait for you, stuff that Sitwell can manage and at the very bottom is the stuff that I might just be able to pull off if the moon is in the right position and the gods are on my side.”

“Good.” He nodded. “We’ll get started on some of it tomorrow.”

“Dude, you just woke up.” Darcy blurted. “It can wait a little while.”

“It’s fine.” He looked up at her. “We’ll start tomorrow. You’ll do some combat training tomorrow morning and at ten hundred hours we’ll start on some of the lighter paperwork.”

Darcy knew he was in pain, probably bummed that the only people he got to see were doctors, his boss and a flighty new personal assistant but he was off. Not that she knew him well at all, her interactions with him were limited to the fateful stealing of her iPod (and Jane’s equipment) to the return of said iPod (and equipment) with a tiny bit of correspondence in between for clean up back in Puento Antiguo. Still he had always put off a type of quiet energy, like at any moment he could deal out serious damage. Now he was just there, wilted and listless and staring at her like she was taking too long to reply. Which… she was and she jolted a little.

“How’d you know I need more training hours?”

“I’m good like that.”

At least there was a smidgeon of humor there. “Fury told you didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

Rolling her eyes, she went to pick up her bag. “Fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Agent Lewis,” he said just as she got to the door. “Thank you.”

Darcy felt herself beam at the sincerity in his tone. “No problem, Boss.”

The next day, and for nearly three weeks after, they would slowly work through paperwork until he was too exhausted. Instead of most of her time being spent in his office, it was now spent in his hospital room. They would work, sometimes quietly and sometimes he would give her explicit details on how to carry out a task for him that couldn’t wait to be dealt with. If he fell asleep she learned to just stay there and get what she could done until he woke up – because if she left he would end up calling her back. Coulson didn’t say anything when she brought in her iPod claiming she made ‘the perfect working playlist’ and he didn’t say anything when she brought him the pen with the Captain America sticker on it.

Little by little she saw that his energy was coming back, and the nurses started talking about physical therapy to get him moving again. She did her best to tone down her babbling and keep a lid on her sarcasm, but she couldn’t help who she was and he always had an equally dry remark for her. It wasn’t ideal, it still blew her mind how weird it was to go from not knowing someone at all to be sitting at their bedside everyday, but Darcy couldn’t complain – even if he did make her actually go to combat training.

“Okay, boss, you need to sign these,” she entered the room in a bustle and set down a stack of papers on the bed. “Wow. That looks appealing.” She stopped dead at the honestly dreadful looking tray of food set up in front of him.

Coulson’s lip curled ever so slightly in disgust as he poked once at his jell-o. “I really hate jello.”

“The jello is what you’re complaining about? It’s probably the most edible looking thing on your tray and it’s the one thing you’re complaining about.” Darcy replied.

“I really hate it.”

Darcy plucked it off the tray and took the spoon. “That’s perfectly okay with me.” She took a bite of it, before glancing at him and seeing the look of pure distaste on his face. “Did I cross a boundary? Boundaries and me don’t really get along, Bossman, I mean I can try for the sake of professionalism but I can’t promise anything.”

“I can’t believe you’re eating it.”

Narrowing her eyes she took another bite. “Mmm.”

“That’s foul.”

A giggle bubbled out of Darcy before she could contain it. As she sat in the chair next to the bed she said, “note to self: Coulson has very strong opinions about jello.”

Coulson’s lips twitched into a small smile. “Don’t forget it.”

They didn’t finish that night until after one o’clock in the morning and she had eaten two more cups of rejected jello in the span of the night. After working together for days she had gotten almost nothing personal out of him yet, and she was glad to have learned something about him. He never bat an eyelash at any of the things she blurted out, or even groaned about the amount of work he had missed – but he was genuinely offended by gelatinous desserts. Like finding the tiny Captain America sticker indicating his favourite pen, she got another little piece of what her boss was like underneath all of the paperwork and protocol. It was an accomplishment, a step forward and Darcy was pleased. Also, she got free jello.

The next morning she blew off combat training (Coulson hadn’t actually told her she had to go that day so she felt she was in the clear) and went out for a cup of coffee. She had missed the atmosphere of a real coffee shop, and she craved well-made caffeinated goodness. After paying for a large hazelnut mocha, she glanced into the display case of pastries. None of them really caught her eye, but she noticed a few assorted flavors of cupcakes and she jumped back in line. Uncertain of which flavor to get…she bought one of each.

When she walked into Agent Coulson’s super secret hospital room of lying to the rest of the world, she had an all too revealing grin on her face. His eyebrows knit together but he made no comment. Once again, a tray of food was before him and he was in the middle of soldiering through what might have been a steak at some point – it looked more like a marinated brick to her.

“What flavor of evil gelatinous doom do you have today, Agent Coulson?” Darcy asked cheekily.

“It doesn’t have flavor,” Coulson responded. “But it’s green if it makes any difference.”

“Oh, it does.” She said, conspicuously holding the box of cupcakes behind her back with one hand. “I’ll take that,” she grabbed the cup and set it aside.

“Agent Lewis —”

“Technically it’s Junior Agent Lewis.”

“It would be Agent Lewis if you would get through combat training.”

Darcy gasped, pretending to be offended. “Well, see, I got you a present but since you’re being sassy I don’t think you deserve it.”

Coulson blinked a few times, like he was trying to wrap his head around how he hadn’t noticed how utterly ridiculous Darcy was until now. “What’s the present?”

Darcy tried to stare him down, tried to drag it out for the anticipation, but she eventually just went back to grinning and set the box down on his tray. “I didn’t know what flavor you’d like so I got all the ones they had.”

Coulson opened the box. “Cupcakes.”

“Don’t tell me, you have a deep seeded hatred for baked good too?”

“No, I don’t,” he said, carefully deciding on devil’s food cake with buttercream frosting.

“Dessert is one of the most important parts of a meal, Boss,” Darcy said as she sat and grabbed the rejected cup of jello. “As your PA I couldn’t let you go without it.”

“Good to know where your priorities are, Lewis.”

“My priority is you, Boss.”

It came out before she had time to think about it, and she felt the heat rise on her face. Boundaries were really her worst enemies. Still she played it pretty cool, eating the jello without even looking up at him. But she missed the small smile on his face as he quietly ate his cupcake and didn’t catch it until he said,

“I still can’t believe you’re actually eating that.”

Darcy snorted, and shook her head, but she couldn’t help but feel that this job might not be so bad after all.


End file.
